Mobituaries with Mo Rocca iHeartPodcasts

This special episode comes from the audiobook edition of ROCTOGENARIANS, a brand-new collection of stories from Mo Rocca that celebrates the triumphs of people who made their biggest marks late in life.

Chances are, you know something about the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder. If, like sixty million other people, you once enjoyed the Little House books, you’ll know that the series breaks off when Laura, at eighteen, marries Almanzo Wilder and leaves her parents to start her own life and her own family in her own little house. But Laura Ingalls Wilder didn’t publish Little House in the Big Woods until she was sixty-five. So what happened in the intervening years? And how did the heroine of the books become the beloved author who, many years later, told these charming stories?

ROCTOGENARIANS is available wherever hardcover, ebooks and audiobooks are sold. Learn more: https://bit.ly/4bOBgn6
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Long before her turn as the sermonizing Aunt Esther on "Sanford and Son," LaWanda Page was dazzling Black nightclub audiences - first as the flame-swallowing “Bronze Goddess of Fire”. Then, following in the footsteps of her childhood friend and eventual costar Redd Foxx, she became a queen of raunchy, tell-it-like-it-is stand up comedy. (Let’s just say Aunt Esther would not have approved of LaWanda’s act.) In this season 4 finale, Mo reflects on Page’s influential career with entertainment icon Whoopi Goldberg and remembers the adults-only "party record' phenomenon with comedian Alonzo Bodden.
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Between 1854 and 1929, 250,000 orphans and abandoned children were placed on East Coast city trains and sent west to live with new families. A desperate solution to a desperate problem, some of the stories turned out well and some far from well. The remarkable stories of these riders live on through their descendants, many of whom continue to search for answers about their ancestry. Mo talks to one of these descendants and tracks down the last surviving Orphan Train rider. This episode originally aired on December 20, 2019.
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There’s no shortage of sports teams that change cities or names over the course of their franchise history. But what about the teams that just cease to exist? Perhaps no team story packs more drama into one year of existence than that of Los Dragones de Ciudad Trujillo. It’s a story that combines one of the most celebrated names in baseball history with one of the biggest names in twentieth-century dictatorship. This special episode comes from the audiobook edition of Mobituaries. You can learn more here: http://bit.ly/MoAudio
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If you were a kid watching TV in the 1980s and 1990s, you probably saw a fair number of “Very Special Episodes,” when the usual blissful bubble of the sitcom world was punctured by real-world issues for a half-hour. Drugs, drinking and driving, stranger danger, even AIDS. But never fear, all would be resolved by episode’s end. (Sometimes the material was so heavy, it required a two-parter.) So why did such a mainstay for a generation of families disappear? And how much was Seinfeld to blame? Mo talks with entertainment writer Jessica Shaw and the late great Norman Lear about the birth, life and death of a cultural phenomenon.
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Starting in the early 1970s, Norman Lear changed the face of television, fusing comedy with social commentary. Lear died on December 5th at the great old age of 101. Mo revisits their 2015 conversation for CBS Sunday Morning.
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